04.25.13

….to shit all over Mitch Kupchak. You might recall last Autumn when the Lakers jettisoned Brown in favor of Mike D’Antoni, the former had not little negative to say about Kupchak, the Buss family, Kobe, Dwight Howard, Dyan Cannon, etc. , and was seen loading up on Chick-fil-A without hours of his dismissal. Fast forward this week to Brown’s rehiring in Cleveland, however, and the veteran head coach is suddenly free to dish the dirt on the Lake Show’s dysfunctional family business (“I mean, I take a team without a training camp into the second round of the playoffs and then I’m gone…could you imagine what they would have said if I was the coach with Kobe playing all of those minutes?”) From the LA Sentinel’s Kenneth Miller :

When told that I didn’t think the Lakers would hire a Black coach and was surprised to see that he accepted the job, Brown responded: “I kind of thought about that. I felt they were going to pull out all of the stops to doing everything to win a championship, but that was not the case.” During his first season, the strike-shortened season of 2010-2011, Brown didn’t have the benefit of training camp with a roster that included Derek Fisher and Lamar Odom. Then one day in December, he was called into general manager Mitch Kupchak’s office.

“So, I go up there and he tells me that we just traded Lamar Odom! My mouth just dropped. He explained to me that it was for salary cap reasons, but nothing that he did after that justified anything to do with the salary cap,” Brown said.

Brown said that he wasn’t even consulted or asked what he thought before the trade went down.

“I mean, how can I not be told in advance of losing one of my primary pieces, a guy who was ‘Sixth Man of the Year?’”